Luke Fischbeck: Born 1978 in San Francisco, California;
lives in Los Angeles, California

Luke Fischbeck
recruits guest musicians and audience members to
participate in Lucky Dragons, his communal music
experiment linking sound to video, dance, and interactive
technology. Embodying the current resurgence in creating
psychedelic art as a message of peace, performances
of Lucky Dragons promote friendship and solidarity
through media typically categorized as nonemotional
and isolating—computers, digital instruments, and
homemade electronic devices. Fischbeck’s improvisational
approach to making music reflects life’s unpredictable
beauty in songs he has described as “nature jams.”
Borrowing thematically but not sonically from the
acoustic-folk, protest song tradition, his ambient electronic
pieces incorporate sounds ranging from gritty
urban field recordings to sampled MIDI versions of
medieval flutes, Inuit vocal games, and songs recorded
inside the base of a redwood tree.

Having recorded five albums as limited edition
CD-Rs, Fischbeck now divides his time between touring
and posting music on his interactive website. The
ongoing Hawks and Sparrows (2003– ), originally released
as CD-Rs individually packaged with “the first flowers
of spring,” has evolved into a free-download project. Its
eighteen tracks are based on field recordings taken at
four antiwar gatherings from which he removed all
language-based rhetoric, leaving processed samples of
“pauses, whistles and yells, drums, sirens, helicopters,
electric hums, boom boxes” and more. The unexpectedly
musical results range from meditational, harmonic
loops of sound to crackling distortion that recalls music
played through blown speakers.

Live, Fischbeck breaks down the barrier between
audience and band by conducting his concerts as
workshop-style situations. “Complement Song” (2006)
implores audience members to compliment each other.
The Make a Baby project (2005– ) generates sound based
on skin-to-skin contact: via conductive sensors knit into
tapestries or handheld tubes and wired to his computer,
Fischbeck “meaningfully interprets” frequencies sent
through participants’ physical interaction into a series of
digital feedback loops. As audience members surround
Fischbeck or hold hands to stay connected, determining
the crowd’s visual organization, he also distills these signals
into animated representations of human motion
that appear on a screen as colorful moving patterns.
Microcosmic realizations of the artist’s stated desire for
a world “free of irony,” the sincerely cultivated, loving
environments Lucky Dragons creates with every project
empower the individual, reminding listeners of our ability
to effect change in other social arenas. TRINIE DALTON